SEO and Online Radicalisation

I mentioned a report in The Register a couple of days ago suggesting that the UK Home Office’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) is getting involved in a Europe-wide scheme to somehow tweak Google page rank. It quoted my ICSR report on this issue but there seems to have been some misunderstanding both of what the report says and what the issues really are. Some clarification is required:

1. I haven’t seen The Register‘s sources so I don’t know what the scheme actually entails.

2. SEO (search engine optimisation) is not the same as ‘gaming’ Google PageRank.

3. ‘White hat’ SEO is a suite of perfectly legitimate techniques employed by all good web designers. Pros: long-term boosting of PageRank due to its improved indexing potential. Cons: none.

4. ‘Black hat’ SEO is a suite of illegitimate techniques employed by some more devious web designers. Pros: short-term boosting of PageRank. Cons: short-term; likely to be be blocked by indexing engines; breaks web standards, etc.

5. The ICSR report supports ‘white hat’ SEO; the ICSR report does not support ‘black hat’ SEO.

6. We do not know which sort of SEO the OSCT is proposing.

7. I would be very surprised if OSCT is thinking of ‘black hat’ SEO: they’re not stupid.

8. Theoretically, the Home Office is allowed to provide what SEO training it wishes to whoever it chooses.

9. I don’t think it will work anyway.

10. OSCT will encounter its usual problems in selecting partners for this type of training.

Read what we wrote in the report (pp.18-19) about SEO and search engine filtering. There seems to be some conflation of various methods and approaches in the reporting and commentary of this OSCT initiative. Even though SEO is inevitably a way of manipulating PageRank, ‘white hat’ SEO is partly why this blog and yours will appear in Google results at all. SEO as a pejorative term means ‘black hat’ SEO, and should be avoided by all because it’s counter-productive. I can hardly see the Quilliam Foundation, as mentioned by The Register, assenting to any form of assistance that will result within days – or weeks at the most – in its becoming unavailable to web users.

Here’s a little insight into what the OSCT really wants, perhaps. The Radical Middle Way project is UK.gov’s flagship Muslim communities website and, despite their protestations to the contrary, the ICSR think they’re doing a pretty good job (note: more on that if later deemed necessary). However, we used them as an example in the report of how the significant investment in RMW is perhaps not as effective as it could be. A quick and crude experiment I’ve just performed:

Punching ‘jihad’ into Google.com returns RMW at #445; they perform much better on Google.co.uk, coming in at #59.

Searching for ‘islam’ on Google.com returns RMW at #205; again, better on Google.co.uk, at #160.

I wonder if this is of concern to government? In a sense, it doesn’t really matter. The results above RMW in all four cases are the usual mix of press, reference sources, blogs (both friends and opponents of this blog), humour, books, etc. It also includes US military sites, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, thinktanks, etc. Very little jihadi stuff, of course.

If the OSCT scheme comes into force, can we expect RMW’s PageRank to rise?

Some reactions from the blogosphere on The Register story:

Zero Intelligence Agents – PageRank as a Weapon Against Extremism

Robert Bonnett – Islam and Search Engine Optimisation

Security Management – British Government Wants to Bolster Moderate Islam in Search Results

Weasel Zippers – UK: Government Plans to “Flood the Internet With Positive Interpretations of Islam” Via Google Searches….

Also at Prison Planet, The Internet Patrol, Gadgetopia, Brian Roberts, Baseball Media Watch, The Blog of Record